Reader: Vote no on Initiative 300, which is so long it's got to be wrong

Local restaurateurs are feeling sick about Initiative 300, the Paid Sick and Safe Time proposal that will be on the Denver ballot arriving in mailboxes next month. At an EatDenver meeting Wednesday, independent restaurateurs talked about how many of them already offer paid time off for their employees -- but they have their own systems, rules and cultures, and they don't like the idea of a sixteen-page ordinance dictating exactly how they have to do business. These restaurants are independent, after all.

Here's Dave Barnes's take on that proposal:

No. There are too many words. 3377 to be precise. FYI - TABOR was only 1900 words.

Writes Doug:

From what I understand about this...this is absolute insanity! Who came up with this? How did a bill like this even get to a vote?

Shouldn't we be passing laws to encourage hiring not incentivize companies to do anything they can to NOT hire additional employees? Seriously, how did a bill like this come to be?

Dan5280 offers this explanation:

Any half-baked idea can make it to the ballot. All you need is enough signatures......as you walk out of King Soopers, look for the well dressed young men and women asking you to kindly sign if your a Colorado voter and want to protect workers rights.

We'll continue to cover the issues surrounding Ordinance 300. In the meantime, you can read Kelsey Whipple's assessment of how she could use the measure to take a lot of five-day weekends here.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword, Denver’s News and Arts weekly, in 1977; she’s been the editor there ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly Colorado Public Television roundtable Colorado Inside Out, the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies -- a post that got her an unexpected interview with former President Bill Clinton in front of a thousand people (while she was in flip-flops) -- and played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City.